January272009
On my shelf: The Border, Exploring the US-Mexican Divide
David Danelo, a former military man turned journalist spends three months traveling “the world’s most traversed national frontier”, a 1,952-mile line separating the United States and Mexico. He begins this journey at the southernmost tip of Texas, and ends where California meets Baja California. Along the way Danelo crisscrosses between border towns and makes an eager attempt to understand a number of complex issues by talking to locals, coyotes, border patrol, business owners, politicians and migrant workers. Unfortunately, when Danelo is able to dip south of the border, his ability to investigate and present his readers with equally substantial viewpoints from the Mexican side are severely limited due to his inability to speak or understand more than a meager handful of words in Español. Consequently, most of his interviews are on the US side and the analysis reads and feels unjustly lopsided.
Yet I give Danelo credit for not attempting to oversimplify the issue. He does a great job, in fact, with problematizing “the border”, and his observations probe all kinds of issues that go well-beyond the highly politicized crossings of illegal immigrants. Danelo looks at economic and emotional incentives: the vast differences in poverty, opportunity, and safety from violence and lawlessness from one side to the other. He looks at the emotional, economic, and historic ties between border towns on either side, some with origins well before the line was drawn. Danelo discovers differences in subcultures from one border town to the next and shifting attitudes towards “the other” from hostile extremes to perfectly harmonious relations of mutual dependence and respect.
But that’s not all. Add to the mix political corruption plus drugs and you have just opened yourself one whopping can of tequila worms. The enormous black market (thanks to soaring American demand) for illicit drugs has fueled a raging fire of instability, violence, civilian killings, human smuggling, and unlawfulness in Mexican border towns (and beyond) for decades. Although those who light up a joint in the United States do not easily (or ever) make these connections, they have directly contributed to empowering some of the most vicious drug cartels responsible for a total breakdown of law and order in entire Mexican cities, costing dearly not only in terms of innocent lives lost and generations destroyed, but also in terms of the rapid deterioration in security for both countries.
Danelo’s final message is this: There is nothing simple about “the border”. Any hopes for diminishing the rising tide of narcotics-fueled violence, illegal immigrants and anguish surrounding “la frontera” is going to take the cooperation of two nations. Such cooperation will ultimately rest on the recognition of the interdependencies which exist between them, and an understanding of what is at stake if Mexico’s social and economic development is allowed to plummet.
